An interesting dimension within eating disorders, is that of trying to
become / attain a particular image. Every day you weigh yourself,
everyday you look into the mirror and check: Am I there yet?

‘Be careful what you wish for’ is a point that I faced within ‘experimenting’ with eating disorders.

I believed that if I would look a certain way, that I’d be happy. That
people would be nicer to me, that everything would just go ‘easy’ in my
life. Was I in for disappointment…

The thing with trying to become a picture, is that the closer you get to
being that picture – the more people start treating like you a picture.
I was getting ‘negative’ attention more and more in town, would get
harassed more easily when I would go out – even in my own hometown. I
had always seen my hometown as a ‘safe’ place, nothing ever happens. But now the streets I had walked through pretty
much every day of my life where nothing ever happened – suddenly became
full of incidents and I was not as comfortable walking through them
every day, especially when it was dark (when you can’t see people’s
faces in the dark, that sense of ‘anonymity’ really gets people to say
things I’m pretty sure they would not have said in daylight).

So I never really considered this point when I embarked in this project. I thought
getting skinnier and prettier was going to be a ‘good thing’ – but now I
was just being harassed and if did meet new people that were nice to
me, their genuineness was questionable and these relationships would be very superficial and not last very long.

I mean, where are ‘skinny pretty girls’ portrayed? It’s in the
magazines, it’s on tv, it’s on ads – and it all comes down to using sex
to sell. They trust that the particular image is going to prompt a
particular experience within the consumer (which is in essence a sexual one), which the consumer then hopefully, misguidedly, connects to the product/service – so that they go and buy it.

So obviously, if you live in a society that uses pictures to stimulate particular mind experiences and behaviour
– if you’re then going to go and try and be that picture – those type
of behaviours become part of the ‘package deal’. You want to become a
picture? Fine – go for it, but then know you are going to have to deal
with the repercussions as some very nasty behaviour coming your way
because you’ve just given yourself and everyone else they okay to
diminish you and reduce to a mere object, an image.

This is now also not very cool for those people who happen to look like
the people in pictures – as they now get a lot of the same negative
attention and not being taken seriously simply because of that one
point. I mean, it’s gotten to a point where ‘pretty people’ go and get
plastic surgery, not because they want to get prettier, but because
they’re begging the surgeon to please make them uglier – so they can
finally be rid of all the nastiness and be taken seriously as a person
rather than only being considered for their looks (and where in some
cases the surgeon then doesn’t want to do it because apparently it’s
“wrong”).

So this is another one of the little realisations/insights I got while
going through my experiment. How getting what you want is not always
what you wanted because you didn’t take all dimensions/variables into
consideration, how people are completely picture driven and that people
can be very nasty. I’ve always had a general belief that people are
‘good’ – and this was one of the first times
that random people, strangers acted really strange and almost demonic
around me, which you know, is not cool, but in a way it was cool to go
there and see what actually goes on within people’s minds and realise that hmmm, this world is not such a cool place to live in.